How To Name Your Photo Files (from you digital camera)

Here in the United States, we like to do things differents. The way we write the date is one of them — Usually it’s March 23, 2007 in the MONTH DAY, YEAR format. But when you dump your photos from your camera to your computer, using this naming convention isn’t the best, like MM-DD-YY.Cancun-Vacation001.jpg

WHY you ask? Because over time, when you sort your photos files “by file name” in Windows, you’ll find that the files are not sorted by date properly and you won’t be able to find that photo from your vacation 3 years ago as quickly as you should. Your digital photographs will get all mixed up since the YEAR is not the primary part of the file name that is used in the sort in Windows. There’s a better way to name files with dates in them…

TRY THIS FILE FORMAT FOR DATED FILES:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY.filename.jpg

By using the YY-MM-DD naming convention, your files will be sorted in correct chronological order when you sort “by filename”.

Of course, this is not limited to photo files from your digital camera. You can use this naming convention for any type of files on your computer — Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc, etc.